Time Warner Expanding Internet Transfer Caps To New Markets

Akido37 writes "Time Warner Cable is expanding its transfer capping program to new markets in Rochester, NY, Austin, TX, San Antonio, TX, and Greensboro, NC. It seems they have been testing plans with 5, 10, 20, or 40GB of data transfer per month, with prices ranging from $30 to $55 a month. BusinessWeek quotes Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt saying, 'We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business ... We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.' Ars Technica adds, 'The BusinessWeek article notes that only 14 percent of users in TWC's trial city of Beaumont, Texas even exceeded their caps at all. My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is. One the one hand, this suggests that caps don't really bother most people; on the other, it indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic 'reasonable' since it's actually quite low to begin with.'"

Comments

Only 40Gb/month?

[makomk]

Only 40Gb/month on the top plan? Here in the UK, TalkTalk's "free with any reasonably expensive phone package" ADSL is 40Gb/month... though it's not really enough these days, thanks to stuff like iPlayer.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[AliasMarlowe]

40Gb, as in gigabits??? I suppose they'll generously up that to 40GB as in gigabytes.

Now if they made it 400GB, we'd probably stay below the cap most months. There have been a few months when we've been above 500GB, but have never broken the 1TB level. Our service is capped at 100Mb per second, every second of the month. If we saturated it, we'd reach 1TB in about a day.

And in answer to the inevitable question: no we're not sharing movies or music. Having a high bandwidth means you access more stuff, and don't worry how many MB anything is.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[bhtooefr]

Myself, my options are:

Time Warner (I'm paying $44.95/mo for Earthlink via TW, but I'm not in a capped area)
A ripoff artist phone company that claims $14.95/mo for ADSL, but they have about $50-70 in hidden charges on the phone bill, resulting in over $100/mo for basic ADSL and home phone
Dial-up for about $40 for the basic home phone and $10-20 for the dial-up
EvDO with a 5 GiB cap, and I don't have good cell reception here anyway
Stealing wifi from a neighbor that has the same options

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[0xDEAD]

Done, done and done. I let TWC know when I turned in my 3 DVR boxes and shut down my Cable/Phone/Internet service which I had for 10 years that this was one of the major reasons I was switching to FIOS. I have not regretted the switch at all either, FIOS quality and service have been excellent (and I had my doubts as I hated my Verizon land line service!)

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[AliasMarlowe]

This just means that you are an abusive user who should pay a hell of a lot more than I do for Internet access. I only use 1 to 2GB per month, since I rarely do bulk downloading. I think every plan should include 10GB of throughput and each additional GB should be an additional charge. Then assholes like yourself can pay your own way rather than sponging off my payments.

WTF? I live in Finland, so it's most unlikely that you're subsidizing my internet access.

You're talking through your ass with the "abusive user" allegation, too. My ISP has two 10Gb switches as uplink for the local fiber network I'm attached to, and there are just a few hundred fiber subscribers. The optical switch they installed in my house can serve 8 cat6 ports at full speed (and 800Mb is only a fraction of the fiber's bandwidth) - they have clearly planned for us using far more bandwidth than we do today. Even if I used 1TB per month, that would only average 3Mb per second, or about 3% of the capacity of one cat6 port. The current pair of 10Gb switches can handle 700 houses with throughput like that. As I said, our monthly usage is generally less than 400GB, so the switches could handle 1700 houses like ours. In fact, every other fiber customer they have could be using MORE bandwidth than us, and it still would not affect my bandwidth.

Our ISP has done it right: they have adequately provisioned the infrastructure. We don't need to care how much bandwidth our neighbours are using, and they don't need to care how much we're using. The ISP has also overprovisioned the so-called "last mile" segments to each house. The bottleneck, when it arrives, will be the pair of 10Gb switches, which are the easiest to upgrade (much faster switches are already available).

FYI, I pay euro55 per month for the internet access, and also get IP TV and a package of pay channels. The ISP must consider it profitable, as they offer the same package to others, too. Here (Hiltulanlahti in rural Finland, actually), ISPs do not persecute their customers with miserly third-world usage caps. In Helsinki, of course, a similar package starts at about euro45 per month.

Just out of interest, how much are you paying for the few GB you use monthly? And which city/state/region is it, just for the record.

Caps are...

[Aladrin]

Caps are to stop the heaviest users, not the lightest ones. That 14% (which is a lot, not a little) that exceeded their caps are the ones they are targeting. That 14% ties up the majority of the bandwidth and light users get poorer service because of it.

For the record, I have always been one of the top users of every ISP I've ever been with. I was '#1 abuser' for the smalltown ISP I had back 12-15 years ago. I haven't ever let up. (Yes, that's what the ISP called me to my face.)

Overall, their customers are going to be a LOT happier without caps... Caps make customers worried about extra charges on their bill. Most customers will pick a slightly higher priced 'unlimited' plan over one with a cap, even if they would never hit the cap even on crazy months.

Time Warner will figure this out again soon when their competitors get a good hold on their market.

Re:This is amazing...

[Akido37]

I only wonder why they are expanding the test to larger markets where they don't have significant competition from other ISPs

That's the whole point. Here in Rochester, NY, we have no other option but DSL. In Buffalo, NY (about an hour away), they have Verizon FiOS.

We are getting screwed, they are not. We have no other option for broadband, and they do.

Bait & Switch

[Nom du Keyboard]

This is so clearly Bait & Switch that TW should be proscuted within an inch of their corporate lives. Their top officers should be in jail, to wit:

1: Promise unrealistic, unlimited downloads and speeds that discourage all competition.
2: Once you have the monopoly and the consumer has nowhere else to go, bring in onerous download caps that actually reflect the basic capabilities of your pitiful system.
3: Buy off Washington so that you won't be punished for #1 and #2.
4: PROFIT!

The really Big Lie in all of this is that the argument for caps is that the system only has a very limited capability. Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from? Clearly cable companies lie like rugs, and the public and regulatory agencies continue to buy into those lies as we're all being screwed over!